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[Plate 7] from Les chants de Maldoror

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[Plate 7] from Les chants de Maldoror

Artist: Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Publisher: Albert Skira (Paris, 1934)
Printer: etchings: Roger Lacourière, Paris; text: Philippe Gonin, Paris
Author: Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) (French, 1847-1870)
Date: 1934
Dimensions:
Sheet (untrimmed): 13 × 9 13/16 in. (330 × 250mm)
Image: 11 3/4 × 7 1/4 in. (298 × 184mm)
Medium: Etching Paper: Arches cream wove, watermarked
Classification: Prints
Credit Line: Gift of Molly and Walter Bareiss
Object number: 1984.367H
Label Text:A prototype of Surrealist literature, LES CHANTS DE MALODOR, a macabre and hallucinatory narrative prose poem, was first published in 1868-69. This was Dali's first major work of original book illustration.

Les Chants de Maldoror by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, a macabre and hallucinatory prose-poem of violence, cruelty, and perversion first published in 1869, was a text much revered by the Surrealists. Salvador Dalí, for his commissioned etchings, recycled motifs from his paintings and drawings – soft watches, decaying flesh, eroticized bodies, knives, bones, crutches, pedestals – and exploited his deep knowledge of Freudian symbols to create vivid visions of putrefaction, cannibalism, death, castration, and fetishized sex.
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